Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter: A Novel

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  But (a snowball that on rolling down the mountainside turns into an avalanche) one day Lucho Abril Marroquín gave himself such a scare that he rushed to Dr. Acémila’s office, taking a taxi so as to get there sooner. The moment he entered her austere consultation room, in a cold sweat, his voice trembling, he exclaimed: “I very nearly pushed a little girl under the wheels of the San Miguel streetcar. At the very last instant I restrained myself because I saw a policeman.” And sobbing like one of them, he cried: “I was just on the point of becoming a criminal, Doctor!”

  “You’ve already been a criminal, young man, have you forgotten?” the lady psychologist reminded him, stressing each syllable. And after looking him up and down, she announced, in a satisfied tone of voice: “You’re cured.”

  Lucho Abril Marroquín suddenly remembered then (a blinding flash of light in the darkness, a shower of shooting stars falling into the sea) that he had arrived in—a taxi! He was about to fall on his knees but the lady savant stopped him. “No one licks my hands except my Great Dane. Enough of these effusions! You may go now, for new friends are awaiting me. You will be receiving my bill shortly.”

  “It’s true: I’m cured!” the medical detail man kept joyously repeating to himself: during the last week he had slept seven hours a night, and instead of nightmares he had had pleasant dreams in which he was lying on exotic beaches, tanning himself beneath a glorious sun as round as a soccer ball, watching giant tortoises slowly lumbering along amid tall palms with tapering fronds and the roguish fornications of dolphins in the blue waves. This time (determination and foolhardiness of the man who has undergone baptism under fire) he took another taxi to the Laboratories and during the trip there he wept on perceiving that the only effect that riding through life was having on him was not the deathly fear, the cosmic anxiety of days gone by, but merely a slight dizzy feeling. He ran to kiss the Amazonian hands of Don Federico Téllez Unzátegui, calling him “my wise counselor, my savior, my new father,” a gesture and words that his superior accepted with the deference that every self-respecting master owes his slaves, while at the same time (Calvinist possessed of a heart impervious to sentiment) pointing out that, cured or not of his homicidal complexes, he was to show up for work on time at Rodent Exterminators, Incorporated or be fined.

  It was thus that Lucho Abril Marroquín emerged from the tunnel that, following the accident amid the dust of Pisco, his life had been. From that time on, things began to straighten out. The sweet daughter of France, recovered from her trials and tribulations thanks to pampering by her family and invigorated by a Norman diet of runny Camemberts and slimy snails, returned to the land of the Incas with glowing cheeks and a heart full of love. The couple’s reunion turned out to be a prolonged honeymoon—intoxicating kisses, compulsive embraces, and other emotional dissipations that brought the amorous spouses to the very edge of anemia. The medical detail man (serpent with redoubled energies after shedding its skin) promptly regained the preeminent position he had formerly held in the Laboratories. At his own request, wishing to prove to himself that he was the same capable man as before, he was again entrusted by Dr. Schwalb with the responsibility of visiting the cities and towns of Peru, by air, land, river, and sea, to acquaint doctors and pharmacists with the virtues of Bayer products. Thanks to his wife’s thrifty habits, the couple were soon able to pay off all the debts they had contracted during the crisis and buy a new Volkswagen on credit—a yellow one, naturally.

  To all appearances (but doesn’t popular wisdom recommend “not trusting in appearances?”), there was not a single cloud on the horizon threatening to darken the life that the Abril Marroquíns were leading. The Bayer representative rarely remembered the accident, and when he did, he felt proud rather than remorseful, a fact which (being a mesocrat who respected social conventions) he was careful to keep to himself. But within the privacy of his own home (a nest of turtledoves, a fire blazing on the hearth to the accompaniment of Vivaldi violins), something had survived (light that continues to shine in space when the star that emitted it has ceased to exist, fingernails and hair of the dead man that continue to grow) from Professor Acémila’s therapy. On the one hand, an inordinate penchant, at Lucho Abril Marroquín’s age, for playing with wooden figurines, Meccano sets, toy trains, tin soldiers. Little by little the apartment became cluttered with toys that annoyed the maids and bewildered the neighbors, and the first shadows cast upon the conjugal harmony of the couple made their appearance the day the little French wife began to complain that her husband spent all his Sundays and holidays sailing little paper boats in the bathtub or flying kites from the roof terrace. But even more serious than this exaggerated fondness for toys, and obviously incompatible with it, was the phobia toward children that had continued to linger in Lucho Abril Marroquín’s mind ever since the days of the “Practical Exercises.” It was not possible for him to meet one of them on the street, in a park, or in a public square, without inflicting what the vulgar would call cruelty on him, and in conversations with his wife he was in the habit of using such scornful expressions as “the weanies” or “the limbomanes” when he spoke of them. This hostility turned into acute anxiety the day the blonde became pregnant again. The couple (heels that fear transforms into propellers) flew to Dr. Acémila’s office to seek her moral and scientific advice.

  She heard them out without being in the least alarmed. “You are suffering from infantilism, and at the same time you are a potential infanticidal recidivist” was her skillful, telegraphic diagnosis. “Two bits of foolishness that don’t deserve being taken seriously and that I cure as easily as I spit. Have no fear: you’ll recover before the fetus grows eyes.”

  Would she cure him? Would she free Lucho Abril Marroquín of these specters? Would the treatment for infantophobia and herodism be as risky as that which had emancipated him from his wheel complex and his obsession with crime? How would this psychodrama of San Miguel end?

  Eleven.

  Midyear exams at the university were approaching, and because I had attended classes less since my romance with Aunt Julia and written more (Pyrrhic) stories, I was ill-prepared for this critical moment. One of my fellow students, a boy from Camaná whose name was Guillermo Velando, was my salvation. He lived in a boardinghouse downtown, just off the Plaza Dos de Mayo, and was a model student who never cut class, took exhaustive lecture notes that even indicated where and how long the professors paused for breath, and learned the articles of the Code by heart, the way I learned poems. He was always talking about his home town, where he’d left a fiancée, and he could hardly wait to get his law degree so as to be able to leave Lima, a city he detested, and set himself up in practice in Camaná, where he would do battle to bring progress to the region where he’d been born. He lent me his notes, whispered answers to me when we had tests, and whenever exams were coming up, I would go to his boardinghouse in the hope that he could give me some miraculous synthesis of what had gone on in class.

  I was on my way home from there that Sunday, after spending three hours in Guillermo’s room, with my brain reeling with legal terms, terrified by the thought of how much jargon in Latin I had to memorize, when, arriving at the Plaza San Martín, I spied in the distance the little window of Pedro Camacho’s lair, standing open in the dull gray façade of Radio Central. I naturally decided to go say hello to him. The more time I spent with him—even though our relationship was still limited to very brief conversations over a café table—the more fascinated I was by his personality, his physical appearance, his rhetoric. As I headed across the plaza toward his office, I thought once more of the iron will that was responsible for this little man’s tremendous capacity for work, his ability to produce, from dawn to dark, from morning to night, stories full of tempestuous passions. At whatever hour of the day I happened to think of him, I would say to myself: “He’s busy writing,” and I could see him, as I had so many times, pecking away at the keys of the Remington with two lightning-quick index fingers and gazing at the platen
with delirious eyes, whereupon I would feel a curious admixture of pity and envy.

  The window of his little cubicle was halfway open—I could hear the typewriter keys pounding away rhythmically inside—and as I pushed it open all the way, I called out: “Hello there, hardworking sir.” But I had the impression that I’d poked my nose into the wrong place or was addressing some unknown person, and it took me several seconds to recognize the Bolivian scriptwriter beneath his disguise consisting of a white smock, a surgeon’s skullcap, and a long rabbinical black beard. He went on writing impassively, without even looking at me, his back slightly hunched over his desk. After a moment, as though he were pausing between one thought and the next, but without turning his head in my direction, I heard him say in his perfectly placed, tender voice: “The gynecologist Alberto de Quinteros is delivering his niece’s triplets, and one of the little runts is going to be a breech birth. Can you wait five minutes for me? I’ll do a Caesarean on the girl and then I’ll go have a verbena-and-mint tea with you.”

  I sat on the windowsill smoking a cigarette as I waited for him to finish the breech delivery of the triplets, an operation that as a matter of fact took him no more than a few minutes. Then, as he removed his costume, carefully folded it up, and put it away in a plastic sack along with the patriarchal false beard, I said to him: “It only takes you five minutes to deliver triplets, Caesarean and all. I’m amazed: I struggled for three weeks over a story of three little kids who levitate by taking advantage of the lift effect of planes taking off.”

  As we were walking over to the Bransa, I told him that after having turned out a whole bunch of stories that were miserable failures, the one about the levitating kids struck me as passable and that I’d taken it to the Sunday supplement of El Comercio, in fear and trembling. The editor-in-chief had read it in front of me and given me a mysterious answer: “Leave it, and we’ll see what we can do with it.” Two Sundays had gone by since then; I’d rushed out each weekend to buy the paper, and thus far, there’d been no sign of its appearing.

  But Pedro Camacho was not one to waste his time on other people’s problems. “Let’s skip our pick-me-up and walk instead,” he said, taking me by the arm just as I was about to sit down, and leading me back to La Colmena. “I have pins and needles in my calves, a sure sign I’ll soon be having cramps in them. It’s the sedentary life I live. I need exercise.”

  It was only because I knew what his answer was going to be that I suggested that he follow the example of Victor Hugo and Hemingway and write standing up.

  But this time I was wrong. “Interesting things are happening at La Tapada,” he said without even answering me, as he led me round and round the monument to San Martín, almost at a trot. “There’s a young man staying there who weeps on moonlit nights.”

  I rarely came downtown on Sundays and I was surprised to see how different the people who were there on weekdays were from the ones I saw now. Instead of middle-class office workers, the square was full of maids on their day off, mountain boys with ruddy cheeks and big clumsy clodhoppers, girls with braids and bare feet, and itinerant photographers and women selling food wandering amid the motley crowd. I made the scribe stop in front of the female figure in a tunic in the center section of the monument who represents the Motherland, and to see whether I could get a laugh out of him, I told him why an Auchenia was bizarrely perched on her head: when the bronze was cast, here in Lima, the foundry workers had not understood the sculptor’s instructions to crown her with a votive flame—a llama votiva—and instead had topped the statue off with the animal of the same name.

  Naturally, he didn’t even smile. He took me by the arm again, and as he hurried me along, bumping into people out for a leisurely stroll, he went on with his monologue, indifferent to everything around him, beginning with me. “Nobody’s seen his face, but there is reason to believe he’s some sort of monster—the bastard son of the owner of the pensión perhaps?—suffering from all sorts of hereditary defects, dwarfism, bicephalism, a hunchback, whom Doña Atanasia hides during the day so as not to frighten us and lets out only at night to get a breath of fresh air.”

  He said all this without the slightest emotion, like a recording machine, and to pump him for more information, I said his hypothesis sounded farfetched to me: couldn’t he be a young man who was weeping over his love troubles?

  “If he were a love-smitten young man, he’d have a guitar, or a violin, or sing,” he replied with scorn tinged with compassion. “But all this one does is weep.”

  I tried to get him to explain the whole thing to me from the beginning, but he was vaguer and more self-absorbed than usual. The only thing I could get out of him was that someone, for several nights now, had been crying in some corner of the rooming-house or other and that the lodgers at La Tapada were complaining. The owner of the place, Doña Atanasia, claimed she knew nothing about it, and according to the scriptwriter, used “the ghost alibi.”

  “It’s also possible that he’s weeping over a crime,” Pedro Camacho speculated, in the tone of voice of an accountant adding up figures aloud, still holding me by the arm and steering me toward Radio Central after a dozen turns around the monument. “A family crime? A parricide who’s tearing his hair and gouging his flesh in remorse? A son of the rat man?”

  He wasn’t the least bit agitated, though I noted that he was more distant than usual, more incapable than ever of listening, of conversing, of remembering that there was someone with him. I was certain that he didn’t even see me. I tried to get him to go on with his monologue, for it was like seeing his imagination working at top speed, but as abruptly as he’d begun speaking of the invisible weeper, he suddenly fell silent. I watched him settle down to work again in his lair, taking off his black suit coat and his little bow tie, tucking his wild mane into a hairnet, and putting on a woman’s wig with a bun that he took out of another plastic sack.

  I was unable to contain myself and let out a roar of laughter. “And who is this lady in whose company I have the pleasure of finding myself?” I asked him, still laughing.

  “I must give some advice to a Francophile laboratory assistant who’s killed his son,” he explained to me in a sarcastic tone of voice, gluing a coquettish beauty mark on his face this time instead of the patriarchal beard he’d worn before, and putting on a pair of colored earrings. “Goodbye, friend.”

  The moment I turned around to leave, I heard—coming back to life, steady, self-assured, compulsive, eternal—the Remington pounding away. Riding back to Miraflores in a jitney, I thought about Pedro Camacho’s life. What social milieu, what concatenation of circumstances, persons, relations, problems, events, happenstances had produced this literary vocation (literary? if not that, what should it be called, then?) that had somehow come to fruition, found expression in an oeuvre, and secured an audience? How could he be, at one and the same time, a parody of the writer and the only person in Peru who, by virtue of the time he devoted to his craft and the works he produced, was worthy of that name? Were all those politicians, attorneys, professors who went by the name of poets, novelists, dramatists really writers, simply because, during brief parentheses in lives in which four fifths of their time was spent at activities having nothing to do with literature, they had produced one slim volume of verses or one niggardly collection of stories? Why should those persons who used literature as an ornament or a pretext have any more right to be considered real writers than Pedro Camacho, who lived only to write? Because they had read (or at least knew that they should have read) Proust, Faulkner, Joyce, while Pedro Camacho was very nearly illiterate? When I thought about such things, I felt sad and upset. It was becoming clearer and clearer to me each day that the only thing I wanted to be in life was a writer, and I was also becoming more and more convinced each day that the only way to be one was to devote oneself heart and soul to literature. I didn’t want in the least to be a hack writer or a part-time one, but a real one, like—who? The person I’d met who came closest to being this fu
ll-time writer, obsessed and impassioned by his vocation, was the Bolivian author of radio serials: that was why he fascinated me so.

  Javier was waiting for me at my grandparents’, brimming over with happiness, with a program for the rest of that Sunday that would have been enough to raise the dead. He’d just received the money order that his parents sent him every month from Piura, along with a good bit extra for the national holidays, and he had decided that the four of us would spend this unexpected windfall together.

  “In your honor, I’ve drawn up a cosmopolitan, intellectual program,” he said to me, with a hearty clap on the back. “Francisco Petrone’s Argentine theatrical company, a German repast at the Rincón Toni, and winding up the festivities French-style at the Negro-Negro, dancing boleros in the dark.”

  Just as Pedro Camacho was the closest thing to a writer that I’d ever seen in my short life, among all my acquaintances Javier was the one whose generosity and exuberance made him most resemble a Renaissance prince. Moreover, he was a very efficient planner: he’d already informed Aunt Julia and Nancy of what was awaiting us that night, and he already had the theater tickets in his pocket. His program couldn’t have been more enticing, and it immediately dispelled my gloomy reflections on the vocation and the miserable fate that awaited the man of letters in Peru. Javier was also very happy: he’d been going out with Nancy for a month now, and their keeping company together was taking on the proportions of a real romance. My having confessed my feelings toward Aunt Julia to my cousin had been very useful to him because, on the pretext of helping us hide our secret and making it easier for us to go out together by double-dating, he’d been managing to see Nancy several times a week. My cousin and Aunt Julia were inseparable now: they went out shopping and to the movies together and exchanged confidences. My cousin had become an enthusiastic fairy godmother of our romance, and one afternoon she raised my morale by remarking to me: “Julita has a way about her that cancels out any difference in age, Marito.”